“God, that’s awful. Did you try to stop him?”
Nina felt insulted by the question. She thought of how she had begged Jimmy to leave the bar and come back with her. “Of course I did!” she cried.
He reached out across the cold glass top of the patio table and took her hand. “That was stupid of me,” he said. “I know you did.”
She met his gaze and felt a tightness in her chest and a lassitude in her limbs. The desire to touch his skin, to feel his lips, to fold herself against him was like a drug in her veins. A weakness, she reminded herself, that she could not afford. He was engaged. He belonged to someone else.
She drew herself back. “So?” she said, deliberately misunderstanding him. “You think I didn’t handle it the right way with my brother? Maybe you think I should have physically dragged him out of there. Or called the cops.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said.
“I don’t care how you meant it,” she snapped. “I’m cold. I’m going in.”
Andre turned his face away from her and looked at the ground. Instantly, she felt sorry for taking out all her frustration on him. He had done nothing but try to help her. He didn’t deserve her bitterness.
“You’re right. It’s getting cold out here,” he said. “I better be going.”
Apologize, she thought. You are deliberately twisting his words. But no apology rose to her lips. Her heart seemed to be roiling with anger and disappointment. “That’s a good idea,” she said, standing up.
Andre nodded, as if he understood something unspoken, and then he got up from the patio chair. He dumped out the leftover coffee, gathered up the empty cups and packets, and put them in the bag. Then he jammed the bag into the pocket of his coat.
“Nina,” he said, “I don’t think you should go pursuing this guy … Mears, is it?”
“Calvin Mears. And I don’t really need any more advice. Thank you, but I’m sure I’ll be fine,” she said coldly.
He turned away and she thought she heard him sigh. He started to walk around to the front of the house, and she followed the tracks of his boots in the gauzy snow. When they reached the walk they separated. He headed down toward his car, which was parked on the street. She thought to wave to him, but he did not look back at her.
· · ·
“JIMMY?” Rita leaned over and searched her customer’s face. “I’m going off my shift. Can I call somebody to come and get you?”
Jimmy looked up at the waitress’s face through a fog. He knew what she was saying. She was saying that he was in no shape to drive. But he wasn’t that far gone. He tried to say “No” but ended up making a grunting noise.
“How about one of the guys from work that you come in here with? Pete. I could call Pete for you,” Rita suggested.
Jimmy’s half-closed eyes widened in alarm. Not Pete, he thought. Not anybody from work. If they saw him like this, half in the bag and needing a ride home, he might not have that job for much longer. His dulled brain made a sloppy search through the possible names and faces. Not Nina. Not after this afternoon. And not Rose. Definitely not Rose. Or George. They would look at him so sadly, and what would he say? After all the pep talks and the prayers, how could he explain?
Jimmy’s eyes closed, and then he started and looked up at Rita’s kindly face. “Call Patrick,” he said.
“Do you have a phone number for Patrick?” Rita asked.
Jimmy patted himself up and down, trying to remember. Patrick’s phone number. He used to know it by heart.
“Is it in the book?” Rita asked.
Jimmy looked up at her gratefully and nodded. “Patrick Avery,” he said. “In Hoffman.”
“Okay,” she said, putting a glass of water down in front of him. “Here’s some water. I’ll give Patrick a ring.”
Jimmy grabbed her forearm as she tried to turn away. “ ’Smy brother,” he said.
Rita nodded, and pried his fingers off her arm. She disappeared behind the bar as Jimmy tried, with a trembling hand, to lift the water to his lips.
The water slopped onto his hand and onto the table. He set it down carefully and tried to think. He knew what they would ask him. Why did you do it? Why did you start again? All these years and now here you are. Over the edge in one precious day.
He knew when he was driving here, leading Nina here. He knew he wasn’t going to make it through his confession without something. He’d tried praying in the car, but it didn’t work. His mind kept drifting away from redemption. He knew what the look on Nina’s face was going to be. The contempt in her eyes. Nina had no idea what it was like to live as he had lived. His heart, his mind, everything cried out for oblivion.
But it wasn’t only that. If he were honest, he’d admit he had known what was gonna happen when he saw Calvin today. When he’d walked into that funeral home and looked at Calvin’s face, he’d felt like an old man. A tired old man who had resigned himself to penance, and given up everything that had ever made him happy. Given it up and accepted being half alive. Never doing too much of anything. Never caring too much about anything or anybody. Never really laughing. When he saw Calvin he remembered what it was like to feel high. High and alive. He remembered. And he wanted it back.
Now Nina knew everything about that night. He was like a man turned inside out. All his secrets were on the outside now. Well, not all his secrets. He still had to tell Patrick. He knew that. He had to. He had to confess to Patrick before he could really be free. And once he was free, he planned to celebrate. That’s right. Celebrate.
“Is that your Jag out there, mister?” he heard a man at the bar saying in a loud, taunting voice.
Jimmy looked up. Patrick had come in, still wearing his good suit and his Burberry raincoat. The men at the bar were looking at him with dislike. Dislike tinged with envy.
“Yes, it’s mine,” said Patrick in an impatient voice.
“Runs kind of ragged, don’t it?” asked another man.
“I know,” said Patrick. “It needs a tune-up.”
“You think you’d take care of a piece of machinery like that,” one of the men at the bar said to the other. “Not just drive it into the ground.”
Patrick was looking around, searching the dark corners of the bar. Jimmy raised his hand weakly and Patrick’s irritated frown turned to a glare. He strode up to the table where Jimmy still sat.
“What the hell happened to you?” he demanded in a low voice. “Jesus, Jimmy. You’re going right down the fucking tubes.”
Now that Patrick was here, Jimmy knew what he had to do. He had to tell Patrick. About the robbery and Calvin and everything. He had to tell him everything. Just like Nina. Jimmy reached up and hooked one of the buckles on Patrick’s coat.
“Let go of that,” Patrick said, pulling his coat free. “Come on. You can sleep at my house tonight. Is your car here?”
“My car?” Jimmy repeated, confused.
“I’ll drive you by in the morning,” said Patrick. “You can pick it up then. Come on. Did you pay yet?” Jimmy blinked at his brother. Patrick reached under Jimmy’s arm and around his back and hoisted him to his feet. Jimmy swayed above him. “You fucking moron,” said Patrick, throwing money down on the table.
Jimmy let himself be led outside. The cold air hit him like a bucket of water, and he felt suddenly much more lucid than before. He looked up at the night sky. There were still some snowflakes coming down but nothing much was sticking to the ground. Patrick hauled him to the Jaguar and opened the door.
Jimmy leaned on the open door. “Patrick. I have to tell you …”
“That’s fine,” said Patrick. “Get in the car, Jim.”
“Issabout what happened. Issabout Mom … and Dad … and Calvin.”
Patrick’s jaw tightened and he shook his head. “Just get in the goddamned car.”
“Lemme tell you, Patrick …” Jimmy pleaded. “I gotta tell you.”
Patrick pushed him down roughly into the passenger seat. “Yeah. Yeah. Tell
me when we get home,” he said. “Now get your hand inside before I slam the door on it.”
22
NINA ’ S cell phone rang in her coat pocket as she closed the front door. Answering it as she shrugged off her damp coat, she was surprised to hear her great-aunt’s thready voice on the other end.
“Aunt Mary,” she said. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, dear,” her aunt said. “I hate to bother you. But I talked to the doctor today and he said I can go home tomorrow.”
“That’s great,” said Nina, trying to hide her dismay. Tomorrow she planned to track down Calvin and get the answers she needed about her father’s last days. But she couldn’t let down her aunt. All right. Tonight, she thought. I’ll do it tonight. He’s got to still be in Seaside Park with his relatives. There has to be a way to find him. And then she had another, dismal realization. Her aunt’s bedroom was still torn apart. Only half the trim was painted. All the furniture was still in a covered heap in the middle of the room.
“I know how busy you are, Nina, and I hate to put you out,” Aunt Mary said. “But do you think you could come out to Hoffman and pick me up and bring me home?”
Nina’s headache, which had abated slightly while she was sitting on the back patio, came rushing back full force. She wasn’t about to tell her aunt that she was already in Hoffman, or why. But she knew she had to quickly rearrange her priorities. “Of course,” she said. “Of course I can. When shall I come for you?”
“How soon can you get here?”
There was only one right thing to do. “I’ll be there in the morning,” said Nina. She was so tired that all she wanted to do was lie down and close her eyes. But the room was not going to paint itself. She had to get it done tonight.
Nina put on her painting clothes, laid out the painting supplies, and set to work. The work went quickly once she got started. Luckily she and Duncan had already done most of it. She just had to finish the trim. And she had long ago washed the curtains, which had required several washings, but were now ready to be rehung. When the painting was finished, Nina looked around and felt a glimmer of satisfaction at the result. She had picked a light yellow, which she hoped was close to the original color. She uncovered the furniture and pushed the pieces back into place, being careful not to scuff the new paint. The pictures she would rehang in their original places in the morning, when she hung the curtains. She’d started to close up her paint can when she noticed the closet. Should she paint it? It would be such an effort to clear it out.
She looked at the closet critically. It really needed a coat of paint, and there was no way she was ever going to do this job once Aunt Mary was back in the house. All right, she thought with a sigh. It’ll keep my mind off everything else. She reached into the closet and began to pull out the clothes, laying them across the bed still on their hangers. She put the shoes in a plastic bag and moved them out. She had emptied the closet of all the shoes, clothes, and accessories, and was about to begin to sweep it out, when she noticed a couple of cardboard boxes in the corner. She was tempted just to leave them there, but her sense of order was offended at the idea of painting around them.
Just pull them out, she thought. It’s not that much. She had to get down on her knees to reach the boxes. She was grateful that her aunt was not a hoarder like lots of old ladies. I’d never get finished, she thought. Aunt Mary probably doesn’t even remember these boxes are here. Nina dragged the dusty cartons onto the floor beside the closet. I should probably leave them out for her to go through and throw them away if she wants. But even as she thought this, she lifted the top off the first box and saw that it was filled with newspapers. The headline on the top paper struck her like a blow. “Doc’s wife stabbed to death.”
Nina sank down onto the rug and stared at the photos of her parents and the picture of their old house, which were splashed across the yellowed front page. With trembling hands she reached in for the next paper, neatly packed in the box. In this edition, Marsha’s murder shared top billing with the discovery of a baby’s body in the park. Again she saw the photo of their old house and, below the fold, a photo of the baby’s shallow grave. She lifted off the next couple of papers. Each day, her mother’s murder was the lead story. The next time the murder got the entire banner was a headline reading, “Doc arrested in wife’s murder.”
Oh my God, Nina thought. Aunt Mary saved every one of these. She took the lid off the other carton and saw that this box, too, was filled with papers. She couldn’t remember ever having seen the newspapers or watched the news at the time of her mother’s murder. But her aunt had saved every single paper dealing with her niece’s death. Part of Nina wanted to throw them away, but the desire to read about these events that had changed her own life so completely was far too compelling. She reached for the first paper and began to skim the various reports.
In one edition, a crudely drawn crime scene sketch showed, with arrows and broken lines, how Marsha had crawled from the kitchen to the living room, leaving a trail of blood. Nina had always known that Marsha was killed in the kitchen with one of their knives from the block on the counter. But why did she crawl into another room, mortally wounded like that? Nina wondered. It must have been some instinctual urge to escape, or perhaps aberrant thinking brought on by the attack.
The mental image of her mother doing that, knowing she was about to die, made Nina start to shake. She pulled the afghan off Aunt Mary’s bed and wrapped herself in it, waiting for the chills to subside before she went any farther. The wind outside the house had begun to howl and rattle the shutters. You shouldn’t do this to yourself, she thought. But she felt like a smoker telling herself she should not light up, knowing that she would. Finally, she picked up the papers again.
The papers published during the trial had minute accounts of the crime, but she was unprepared for a picture published in a Sunday newsmagazine article about the case. It was a photo of her mother, dead on the living room floor. Nina closed her eyes against the gruesome image and steeled herself before she opened them again. She forced herself to look. There was her mother’s body, splayed out on the rug, the newspaper bunched beneath her outflung arm. Nina was grateful that she could not see her mother’s eyes in the photographs. Marsha’s face was in shadow.
Oh, Mommy, she thought. How could anyone hurt you? Her mother looked so gentle and vulnerable, the roll around her midriff exposed where her turtleneck shirt had ridden up. Her mother had always been embarrassed by that stubborn excess weight. She was always trying to diet or walk it off. On her feet, her white ankle socks were splattered with blood. Marsha often padded around the house in her socks. Nina could see that the socks, in addition to being bloody, were slightly grimy on the bottom. Who could be so cruel? Nina thought.
Nina could not stand any more. Enough of this, she thought. Enough. I can’t look at this anymore, she thought. Forget painting the closet. No one will ever even notice. I’ll put all this stuff away tomorrow. I have to get out of this room and away from all this.
She shrugged off the afghan and felt chilly again. Shivering, she dragged herself up to her old pink bedroom, and fell down on the bed in her clothes. She knew she should get up and take a shower, but she was too exhausted. I’ll do it in a minute, she thought. Almost before she could finish the thought she was asleep.
Nina’s dreams were a jumble of images. She dreamed, finally, of her mother. Marsha, alive and cheerful, was standing in the kitchen of their old house. At first Nina felt elation at the sight of her. She started toward her mother, wanting to embrace her. All at once she realized that Marsha was chopping something on the counter with a large carving knife. Nina was frozen, horrified by the sight. She knew she had to warn her mother about the knife, but the words stuck in her throat.
“Go upstairs and paint your room,” her mother said. Nina was afraid to leave her mother there in the kitchen, but she could not speak. “Go on now,” her mother said. “There’s not much more to do. Finish it up.”
“Don’t open that,” Jimmy said. But when she looked up to answer him, he had disappeared. She turned back to the box and pulled it toward her. She lifted the lid, her hands trembling. When she moved it away and looked inside, she saw a baby, its eyes open, its skin cold and bluish.
Nina sat up in bed, her heart pounding. In the room she thought she could hear the echo of her own scream. “Oh my God,” she whispered. She covered her face with her hands. Calm down, she thought. It was just a dream. As her racing heartbeat subsided to a normal rhythm, she reminded herself that it was obvious where the dream had come from. The newspaper stories had brought it all back to her. The baby they found in the park on the day her mother was murdered. It was all mixed up in her dream. I brought it on myself, she thought, by reading those newspapers. She shook her head and sighed.
Looking down, she saw that she was still in her painting clothes. Painting clothes, she thought. Just what her mother always wore. Nina knew she should change—put on a nightshirt or something—but she did not want to get out of the bed. She lay back down and pulled the pink blanket at the foot of the bed around her. But she didn’t sleep. She thought of Jimmy, drinking beer, and wondered if he had got home safely. She thought of Andre, and how she had been cold and driven him away. She tried not to think of the dream. She lay there in the darkness, her eyes wide open, and listened to the wind whipping the trees and howling against the window.
23
ANDRE walked down a long corridor to the desk where, after a variety of security precautions, he and all prison employees were required to show their identity badges and sign in each morning. The guard at the desk, Joe Estevez, was sitting, reading a magazine. He looked up as Andre signed in. “Hey, Doc.”
The Girl Next Door Page 19